PowerBuilder: generating HTML from a datawindow

Question

I want to generate a web component from an existing PowerBuilder application. I may design the web pages in whatever scripting language I choose (ASP/PHP/JSP). I want to design a component that will act as a bridge between my web pages and my PowerBuilder application.

As an example, suppose I have a web page. When the user clicks on a link on this page, it will re-direct the URL arguments to my component which after receiving the arguments communicates with the application, fetches the data that need to be displayed, constructs HTML string from that data and returns the string to the web page which then displays it for the user.

How can I build the component? The Application was written using PowerBuilder 10.5, and I may write this component in PowerBuilder 12.NET or PowerBuilder 12 Classic if need be.

You question was posted in the Sybase newsgroup at around midnight US time. You had a response by the next morning. Sounds pretty responsive to me: forums.sybase.com/cgi-bin/… — Doug Porter
PowerBuilder has a smaller development community than the other platforms you mentioned. Be patient. — Bernard
I started something similar using IIS Handlers & Modules but it's a big spare-time project for one person. Fun project(challenging), open source project maybe, code it so that it kicks out PHP/ASP.NET, etc., anyone want to team up on it? Look at IIS Handlers and Modules, you'll probably have to write it in .NET unless you have better luck creating one in PB than I did. You can then use the handler (assembly) in your PB project and use the web page data to generate datawindow bridge like objects send it back to the .NET handler/module as HTML and/or other code/framework — Rich Bianco

Unknown Unknown · Accepted Answer · 2011-02-15T16:06:49

The newsgroup answer referenced in the comments above was this:

Check out my "eStore" application on the SourceForge link after my 
signature. This application calls PB components from JSP, PHP or ASP/ASP.net 
applications. The PB components in turn use DataWindows that return various 
XML, HTML and JScript back to the web application. The entire PB side is run 
from a framework I developed and runs within EAServer (Sybase's application 
server).

Regards ... Chris
President: OSUG / STD Inc.
Blog: http://chrispollach.blogspot.com
PBDJ: http://chrispollach.sys-con.com
SourceForge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/stdfndclass

PowerBuilder: generating HTML from a datawindow

2 Answers